News/Events

Please consult the Online Calendar of Eventsfor GWS-sponsored and other campus events.

2011 Centennial Event

On April 14, 2011, Paula J. Giddings, the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 Professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College, gave the first of two Centennial lectures on gender and race issues in a historical context, "The Work Can Never Die: Ida B. Wells, 1911 and the Quest for Immortality." Giddings also participated in a panel discussion with Connecticut College faculty members that helped contextualize the founding year, "1911 in Transnational Perspective."

Gender & Women's Studies in action

Over the past few years, students in Gender & Women's Studies classes have also taken an active role on and off-campus. They have:

• Presented original research papers, documentaries, theses at Moving Worlds: A Colloquium (celebrating 100 years of women’s education at Connecticut College)
• Worked with incarcerated women at York Correctional Facility as part of GWS 295: Training for Transformation
• Organized a teach-in against bullying and homophobia on university campuses across the United States in collaboration with the LGBTQ center
• Taken a field trip to NYC to watch the Broadway play "In the Heights"
• Attended the Bryn Mawr international conference "Heritage and Hope: Women’s Education in the Global Context" to celebrate its 125 years in existence
• Joined in deliberations on Sustainable Development at the United Nations, expertly guided by noted Salvadorian human rights activist Marta Benavides
• Taken a six-day road trip with Professors Segrest and Walker-Canton from New London to New Orleans to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina close-up and to join in the rebuilding efforts
• Put in a garden on campus as part of Earth Day 2007
• Organized a conference applying human rights principles to campus sexual assault in a way that opened up spaces for dialogue and action (2008)
• Organized performances of The Vagina Monologues for consecutive years, raising thousands of dollars for women's causes and raising consciousness about sexual assault
• Used CONNSharp grant money to work with Professor and Chair Mab Segrest on her research on the state mental hospital/asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia, as it manifests the relationship between race/class/gender/sexuality, definitions of insanity, and practices of commitment of those genuinely mentally ill, and those merely socially deviant

CONNworks and Gender Grubs faculty forums

The department of Gender and Women's Studies and the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) team up during the academic year to alternate offering "CONNWorks" and "Gender Grubs."

CONNWorks is a forum to present faculty research-in-progress and receive insightful feedback from colleagues throughout the College. Gender Grubs is a forum to discuss pedagogy; faculty present syllabi for review and sharing as a way to encourage transnational feminist content and pedagogy (or, on occasion, to discuss issues pressing to the GWS associated faculty).

In this endeavor, the GWS department and CCSRE are keeping their "brand names" but combining efforts to share research and teaching on race and gender. We hope that this effort will encourage us to think in a more complex manner about how race and gender work together, even as some of us might focus more on one or the other analytic. Projects will likely include class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and/or other factors.

GWS major wins coveted Bunche Institute summer slot

Yalidy Matos '09, a double major in government and gender and women's studies, secured one of 20 coveted spots at the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, a five-week academically intense summer program for underrepresented students interested in political science. Matos first visited the United Nations during a field trip with one of her gender and women´s studies courses and expressed her interest in government after "witnessing government in action." Her adviser, gender and women's studies professor Mab Segrest, encouraged Yalidy, a native of the Dominican Republic, to apply for the Institute. Read the April 15, 2008 news release.